.

More about me ...

Tuesday, 22 January 2013

During a preview at Dior’s blinding white Avenue Montaigne ateliers on
Sunday night, Raf Simons noted that there’s a big difference between
mere flora and gardens. That’s because the human hand is implicated in
the latter: Plants can be left to their own devices or heavily
manipulated. Witness the meticulous, manicured formality of French
gardens, versus the more laissez-faire English approach.

Such a distinction offers a bonanza of possibilities for a conceptually
minded designer like Simons, who let artificial colors and vaguely
botanical constructions creep into his simple show premise “the very
idea of spring,” he said.

Enjoy the DIOR Spring 2013 Couture Show at the end of this post! Love, Andrea

The venue, a mirrored tent virtually
invisible amidst the barren trees surrounding it in the Tuileries, was
done up inside with undulating hedges by Belgian landscape artist Martin
Wirtz. Models styled with small, feathered caps of hair roamed between
the rows, like birds looking for a place to alight. They sported
sparkling red lips and wore fetching confections in an array of Willy
Wonka shades.

If the audience wondered how Simons would top his
couture debut last July, with its million flowers plastering the walls
of a Parisian town house, here was their answer: While similar in theme
and allure to his fall couture offering, his spring collection was even
better.

The show opened quietly a bustier dress with a black
bodice and a fluttering sky blue skirt cut in a Fifties length. Simons
reprised the glossy bell-shaped skirts, the pinch-waist tuxedos and the
sleek bustiers worn over cigarette pants, models’ hands jauntily tucked
into pockets. He referenced the telltale curve of Dior’s iconic Bar
jacket in the flaring hem of scoop-neck satin tops and in the ethereal,
trumpet-shaped bridal gowns that came at the climax of the show.

Simons
also went further with some of the great ideas from his debut. Instead
of featuring different embroideries front and back on dresses, they
mingled in asymmetric fashion on hourglass gowns, or swirled around a
short-sleeved cocktail dress in satin the color of sea foam.

A
modernist at heart, Simons gave familiar silhouettes futuristic verve
with bold, even strange colors: icing the edge of a black bustier dress
with granular neon yellow embroideries, or lighting up a column of
creamy Guipure lace by tinting the edges of floral shapes a shade of red
as searing as a laser.

Simons made it clear he wants to “go
slow” in his makeover of Dior, “so I didn’t want to do a heavy concept,
hence the idea of the garden, flowers, spring and the evolution of
that,” he said. With Paris blanketed with snow, its streets riddled with slush, this “very idea of spring” could not have been more tantalizing.